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Chapter 5
Seventy-eight times had Helena’s view of the wall across from her desk been interrupted so far, but it could have been a large octopus walking around for all she knew. She counted each time someone walked through her line of sight, but they were nothing more than a number to her. After all, she thought, humanity is all about numbers.
There are thirty-one days in the month of March, nine ways to justify killing your boss (Helena had worked it out), eight planets in the solar system and a man named Zero that Helena couldn’t get out of her head.
He is a dangerous, intensely deranged human being, but the only one deserving of that title.
The way he had acted the other night was the most impressive thing she had ever seen. It was everything she had ever wanted to do while sitting counting the people at work rolled into a man with volcanic soil-black hair. He was beautiful, in the same way as an epic and bloody battle.
“Ms. Stone,” someone that definitely looked like someone in charge said to her. He wore a suit, like everyone else there, and had a haircut that looked like a plastic mold, like everyone else there. He was number seventy-nine. “May I ask what it is you are doing?”
Helena ruffled some papers and looked at her computer screen, all in vain of course. She wasn’t doing anything.
She didn’t even know what it was she did here.
“I’m… Ummm… just running some numbers for this report.” It was just vague enough to work.
“Ok, just look alive. We can’t have people staring off into space and getting paid for it,” the man in the suit said as he walked away.
Just like everyone else.
Helena lost count after the ever so life-like number seventy-nine, but it didn’t matter; she was back at Zero now.
She would love to see him again, but maybe he wouldn’t be so magnificent without the glow of destruction.
The other night she dropped him off at the worst-looking apartment building she had ever seen. It was covered in graffiti and looked like a six-storey vertical graveyard in the darkness. She guessed that the burial plots went upwards in perfect rows, and that Zero would be somewhere near the top. She asked him what floor he was on and all he said was, “It doesn’t matter. I’m moving out.”
Zero lived on the first floor.
Easy access for the living.
“So I’ll see you again maybe?” she had asked.
“I guarantee it.” He didn’t sound like he did back at the parking lot. Now he was less enthusiastic, but still sounded sincere when he promised another meeting. He was coming down. Before she could ask when, or where, he had gotten out of the car and walked away. Nothing haunts like an unplanned meeting.
It was possible they would never meet again, in exactly the same way it was possible she’d never live to see tomorrow morning.
Helena knew that if she were ever to see him again she would need to think like him. If they were ever to connect, she would need to be like him. She had the same lust for life, but none of the actions behind it. The decision was made, in a meeting of the minds between the conscious and the subconscious, to let go of everything she was at that moment.
She decided it was time to stand up; walk around the place to look for signs of life. To become a number.
She stood up.
One.
She felt like part of human existence for once. The counting had stopped, and now she began being. Not only was she a part, but she was the most perfect part.
She was One.
The beginning of infinity.
The closest thing to Zero without becoming negative.
Of course, she still remained Helena. Zero’s case was different, as he couldn’t be a non-entity and an entity at the same time.
In a quick look around the place, there was definitely life here. Those who sat at desks were apparently earning their salary, logisticizing and stringing together words to make celluloid sentences. Those who stood up were having high-powered conversations about matters of extreme pseudo-importance. Those who walked walked hurriedly, like on a conveyor belt – walking but not going anywhere.
It was all quite marvelous to watch. Helena would have loved to join in with any of these activities, but all she could do was stand in the middle of it all, looking at the world she became a part of the second she stood up.
She sat back down promptly.
And then got back up.
It was still the same, but she began moving before it crashed into her again. Having dodged the entire office, she walked out of the main room full of desks and into the nearest hallway. It was hospital-white with blue, perfectly identical tiles on the floor. Helena stared at the tiles as she walked down the hallway, making an effort to step on as many as possible.
Tiny little victories.
After having walked on as many insignificant existences as possible, it became known to her that she had made it to the elevator. A decision had to be made here. Did she go down and keep walking or did she go back to her desk and sit down?
Her desk felt about a light-year away as she stood out the front of a hardware store on Main Street. She stood with her back to the display window – full of potentially lethal items that could be sold to anyone, no matter how inclined to violence – looking out across the small part of Oriana City in front of her.
The city was not a city in the traditional sense; it had a substantial population but it did not have any of the extravagant architecture that seemed to be a prerequisite for a city these days. The tallest buildings weren’t exceedingly tall, and the densely populated areas were all much more spread out than in other cities. Not a trace of vegetation could be seen as Helena stared out across the place, and nor had she ever seen a tree here that wasn’t in either of the two parks or in a garden in the outer suburbs.
Zero’s new house was in the hills, which lay to the east. Aside from those hills, Oriana was the most depressingly flat place on Earth.
Across the street from where Helena stood was a line of cafés which were full of people under the control of totalitarian time management; wait to be served, get back to work in time, don’t stand up to the power of delay. Staring at the people that stood in perfect lines, she could have sworn she saw Zero. She had nowhere else to go, so she walked like a polite woman in a bomb scare – briskly – to where Zero was probably not standing.
The café was called the Red Hat. It was probably the least cultured café on the strip, and as a result, the least full. They served generic food for the most part – sandwiches, pies, coffee – and the people here were slightly more proletarian than at some of the other places. One group of men sat at a table in grease-covered overalls. They were talking about politics as far as Helena could tell from the small parts of the conversation. The smallest of them, a red-haired man with a round face, was telling the others about why there would never be a woman mayor. “There just isn’t enough support out there for a woman to manipulate the electoral system like a man could.”
Zero was nowhere in sight.
“A man can be a conservative, but a woman has to be a conservative and a woman. She has two arguments to make, but no one will ever really talk about the gender issue.”
Out of sight, in the bathroom at the back of the café, Zero was walking out the door, to sit back at his table again.
“It’s always been that way,” the small red-haired man said as his buddies agreed. None of them had touched a woman in years.
Defeated, Helena walked out of the Red Hat to look for Zero somewhere else. She thought she knew where.
The second she walked out, Zero sprang callously out of the corridor that led to the bathroom and sat at his table in the corner.
He ordered a salad sandwich and a vanilla milkshake.
Outside, where political minds wear suits rather than overalls, the search for Zero became hopelessly more optimistic. Helena decided to look for him at the apartment building she had dropped him off at. She had forgotten temporarily what Zero said about moving out.
The distance between them grew greater with each step, but Helena increased her pace like it was just the opposite. The journey to the building was about twenty minutes long and by the end of it she was immensely exhausted.
And immensely disappointed.
Which apartment was his was not known to her, and so was his name. Without names attached, people always disappear.
The front of building now revealed itself in the afternoon light. Coincidentally, it looked exactly the same as the rest of the street is Oriana City. The pavement was a dull grey, the walls of the building brick-brown and covered in graffiti, the sky above it like a mocking vision of somewhere else to be. All the unknown setbacks she had incurred since she left the Red Hat now presented themselves as setbacks, instead of false hopes. She sat down on the curb and put her head in her hands. She wasn’t going to find Zero.
After a few minutes, she lifted her head and began counting the cars that interrupted her view of the other side of the street as they drove past.
She was in a completely different part of town, but she was back where she started; separate from humanity and assigning the whole thing numbers.
In the space of an hour, three cars drove past.
Seventeen minutes after the third one, the fourth one struggled past and Helena stood up to wave.
Goodbye, Zero.
It was almost time for her to finish work for the day. She began what felt like a timeless walk back to the office to get her things and leave again. On the way, she thought she saw Zero several times, but by now she was struggling even to remember what he looked like. He had black hair, she knew that much. His face was a glorious flag for living with passion, but it had no tangible form in her mind. If she ever saw it again, however, she would know it to be him. The eyes. It was all in the eyes. Those perfect spheres of ethereal fire, transcending colour to simply become undefined, they would capture her immediately.
It was closing time when she finally reached her desk again. No one had noticed she was missing. She packed up her things, which conveniently included her car keys, and walked down the same corridor as before.
This time she was sympathetic to the tiles, as she was a tile herself; a solidly defined place, an unchangeable colour and being walked on constantly. God help us when the tiles rise up.
When she had once walked out of her office building in the search for the bringer of life, the one who had named himself Zero, she now walked into the street as Helena Stone, just like so many times before.
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